Thank you, Chair.
Thank you both for coming this morning.
Your conclusions kind of caught me by surprise, and that has to do with the larger question of how you define interest. I think one of you made the note that you're rethinking what constitutes national interest. That seems to be kind of a draw-down on the concept of values, a projection of values, and almost flipping it to say, historically speaking, that if we have an economic interest, we're interested. When you apply that lens, you then seem to arrive at the conclusion that our interests are at home, in the Arctic, in the Americas, and in the Pacific. I'm not sure I disagree with that, but on the other hand, what's notable is the leaving out, if you will, of the Middle East, which within the foreseeable future is going to be the source of a lot of conflicts, and Africa, which is in some respects a litmus test, because we actually don't have much in the way of interest there, other than mining interests and things of that nature.
Are you in effect repositioning our relationship to NATO and in effect saying to NATO that the other parts of NATO are going to have to take over these conflicts? I don't know where you're going with these conclusions.